Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

And he? Could he live if someone cut the invisible threads that bound him to the great temple? The temple that had been his life and his heart and his soul from when his memory began.

The girl said, “I’m going to untie him.”

Jarmuli was quite far, it struck him, and the sun had almost set. “What are you doing here?” he asked her. “It is not safe. A woman was. .” He stopped himself from telling her a woman had been attacked nearby the month before, left for dead.

“Let’s find something to cut the rope with,” she said. “Unless we can untie it.” She began to prise open the knots.

Badal pulled out his tin box from the scooter’s basket and extracted his father’s Swiss knife. It had never been used and the gadget had rusted. The springs were stiff. After a struggle he managed to open the blade, and held it towards her. How odd he had the knife with him, he thought, as if he had known all along they would meet again, she would need a knife.

She said, “Will you hold him or will you cut the rope?” She had a small, pointed face, now split open by a comic-book grin that showed all her teeth and a bit of her gums.

He held the rope. The camel smelled of hide and dung and mould, a strong animal stench that made him gag. It had tearful eyes and drooping eyelids fringed with long lashes. Its nostrils quivered as the girl sawed at the rope — on and on until first it frayed, then frayed some more, and then fell apart.

She patted the camel’s side and said, “Go! Run! Far! You’re free now!”

The camel did not move. It hung its head, looking too weary to take another step.

The girl pushed the camel and said, “Shoo, go. . before they come back!”

The camel stood its ground. It had never heard these words before, nor the tone of voice. The girl pushed with all her strength as if the camel were a stalled car. “Move!” Then half giggling, half annoyed, she sighed. “O.K. I give up. It’s your life.”

This time the camel took one tentative step to the left, then another.

“Good!” Nomi said. She walked away from the camel and stood gazing at their surroundings, hands on her hips. “Bleak, no? This place? Not on the tourist trail, right?” She fidgeted with a lighter and from her bag pulled out a bottle of water. She was talking in English now, assuming he understood. He did, after a fashion, but his answers were halting and slow.

The girl lowered her face to shield her cigarette from the wind. She was exactly the kind of person he usually found repellent. Those rings in her ears. That crazy hair. And a woman smoking? He should walk away and leave her to her fate — such people invited trouble. He looked towards his scooter and fingered the keys in his pocket. The girl circled the cigarette to light it. She kept the lighter flame on, waving it at his face and saying, “Want one?”

Badal said, “I don’t smoke, I work at the temple,” and simultaneously put his hand out for one. When she leaned over with a smile to light it for him, he saw that, like Raghu, she had a dimple. Hers was in the right cheek while Raghu’s was in the left, as if the two of them had two halves of the same face. A black smog of grief rose to his throat, choking him.

She shrugged and said, “I don’t really smoke either. But I stole these from a friend of mine when he wasn’t looking. He dumped me at the Sun Temple and left. No explanation, nothing.”

“That is not good,” Badal mumbled. He knew the man she meant, someone drunk, rude, disrespectful, the kind of man he did not want in his head. He had spotted him early that morning on the beach with Johnny Toppo. That man was the reason Raghu had to rush away when he was being given the phone.

“I had to hitch a ride on a bus. It turned off at some village and they told me, Get off. Just like that. Serve that driver right if they found my chopped up body in the bushes. What a relief to find you. I recognised you in a second. You don’t recognise me.”

They sat on the sand. She looked over her shoulder to see where the camel was going. It had hardly moved. “Have you ever seen a donkey’s eyes?” she said. “They’re so beautiful. This camel has eyes like a donkey’s. I’d have loved having those eyes, you know?”

“No,” he said. “I have not looked carefully at a donkey’s eyes.”

He was puzzled by her question. Her eyes — he hadn’t considered them before. Now he saw they were long-lashed and very dark and large, like Raghu’s.

She said, “When you see a donkey, it looks so alone. Like it has no mother or father or friends. Cows never look so isolated.” She flicked her lighter on, then off, then on again. She held up a finger and passed it through the flame, then said, “Don’t you love that it doesn’t get burned when you do that?”

He could make no sense of her talk. And her English, when she spoke so fast, was hard for him to follow even though she broke into sentences in Hindi. Still he followed her logic without missing a step, as if he were a blind man who had counted the number of paces between rooms so that he didn’t need sight any longer.

Having grasped that he couldn’t understand much of her English, Nomi fell silent. The sea rushed towards the beach, then retreated with a roar, as if coming in had been a mistake. There was moisture in the air, Badal could feel it. It smelled of fish and salt-water. Something made an odd grunting sound nearby — the camel, Badal thought. Then he wondered, what sounds did camels make? Did they moo like cows?

Nomi gazed out at the sea and thought she had had its sound in her ears forever. Her first memory of the sea was of being alone by the sea, her mother walking away. A dog came and sniffed at her. How alone she had felt, and how hungry. Her mother — she had spent the last ten years of her life looking for the sea where she had lost her mother. She had been in the sea in Greece — the water was purple and green and blue there. She had seen — she counted — the Sargasso Sea, the Chilean Sea, the North Sea, the Bass Strait, the South China Sea. She’d even dipped a toe in the Baltic Sea — that was icy — and grey like slate. Whole shiploads of children drowned in the Baltic Sea during the Second World War. Think how they died. Frozen. And then there was the Dead Sea — she had not seen it, but she knew that people floated in it, not needing to swim. At every sea, she would sit down like this and wait for it to tell her something, she didn’t know what, but she’d know it when it came. She would be sitting by the sea where she had been left, the one she could sense from her cement cage in the ashram.

Badal felt the wind rise. He could see no clouds, but the sky was lumpy and old, too heavy to stay up. He sensed an approaching storm. High tide too would come in a while and the next morning the beaches would be littered with sodden rubbish. Once he had found a rusted harmonica and had coaxed a few tunes out of it.

Nomi rested her chin on her arms. Those trawler lights on the water, she had thought there were buildings — a whole city across the sea. When she chanced upon a spellbinding place she kept it a secret, as if it existed only for her. Now look: this beach, the trawler, the storm coming — wasn’t it actually a magic show or a stage set? Afterwards they’d dry the wind, clean up the sand, wipe up the sea, fold away the sky, stow the camel and unstring those lights and nobody else would find this place again.

Badal drew lines in the sand with a twig. When Raghu had given him the thick milky tea he had known it was all over — worse, he had known nothing had ever been. The afternoon by the boat, his mouth on Raghu’s, that was a spell he alone had been under and understanding this made him feel as if someone had pushed a hand down his gullet, grabbed his blood-slimed heart and intestines and pulled them out through his mouth the way fisherwomen cleaned fish. His throat came up with an involuntary choking sound. The girl did not seem to hear it. She pulled out two more cigarettes and lit them, putting both in her mouth together like one who chainsmoked every day. She passed him one and he took it from her as if from long habit.